New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

Description

What is Outside Innovation?

It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.
The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes.
The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

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Observations

LEAD USERS

Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.

LEAD CUSTOMERS

I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.

LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS

We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.

HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?

You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!

CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN

In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.

March 07, 2014

Customer Clouds: The Next Big IT Battleground

“Best of” Customer Cloud Articles

We’ve been writing a lot recently about “Customer Clouds.” It’s a term we coined. And it’s a movement we’re fully behind. Most of you rely on us for thought leadership around customer-impacting technology trends. This time, we may be WAY out in front of the parade. But we don’t think so. What’s a “Customer Cloud”? It’s the on-demand computing and networking infrastructure that enables your customers to securely manage their information, their assets, their events, their stuff, and their projects from their mobile devices and/or from their computers.

The fact is that mobile application development is driving most companies’ customer, brand, marketing, and IT strategies these days. Mobile and Cloud go together. They need each other. Mobile apps need secure access to customer data from anywhere. Clouds are a good way to provide that ubiquity. They aggregate customer data and keep customers’ information synchronized across all their devices.

Clouds Are the Current IT Battleground

Amazon, Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, HP are all competing in the cloud space. They all want to win market share by providing the most popular cloud services, cloud hosting environments, and cloud development environments for new and existing businesses and for consumers to use.

Customer Clouds Provide a Useful Lens for Evaluating Cloud Strategies

We’ve decided to focus on the use case of creating customer clouds as a good way to evaluate the relevance of these different players’ cloud offerings for customer-centric execs. Cloud Computing is an interesting technology because it relates to making it easy for customers to do business with you and making it easy for customers to get things done.

Why the Location of Your Clouds Matters

Cloud computing is supposed to be nebulous. Developers don’t need to know or care what computers are being used, or where those computers actually sit. In fact, programmers who write software today often never see the computer that software is running on. They create a computer out of thin air. It’s called a Virtual Machine. It sits in some cloud somewhere, and it runs the programs created by the developer. Voila! Cloud computing.

Five years ago, Ronni Marshak and I did some customer co-design and customer advisory board work with a client whose business customers were companies that developed and deployed Cloud services: IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service). None of these customers mentioned cloud jurisdiction as an issue when we interviewed them before the Customer Advisory Board meeting. The topic of where cloud computing farms are hosted only came up tangentially in the actual discussions.

Then we got them to create Customer Scenario Maps. When we asked these business IT professionals to put themselves in the shoes of their clients and to role-play the decision-making process their clients go through in deciding whether or not to choose a cloud-based solution, they all discussed the fact that their customers needed to know WHERE—in what country—their data actually resided. It had to do with the U.S. Patriot Act, they explained. Non-U.S. customers were not willing to host their customer data in U.S. territory or in a physical data warehouse that is owned by a U.S.-based company. Why? Because they feared that the U.S. government could demand to see their customer information. (Note that this was years before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance practices.) They want on to explain that their Spanish customers wanted their customer data hosted in Spain and their German customers wanted to be sure it stayed in Germany. Their clients valued the flexibility of SaaS and Cloud. They valued the benefits of being able to expand and contract their computing resources within minutes. They appreciated the cost benefits of pay-as-use it computing infrastructure. But they needed to have control over where their customer data actually resided. What country was it in? What legal jurisdiction?

Last week, IBM made some major announcements about its cloud strategy. The most important thing I heard amid all the new capabilities was IBM’s focus on expanding its cloud footprint into as many places in the world as possible, because customers need control over the jurisdiction in which their customers’ data resides.

Where Are Your Clouds? Location Matters! Why Your Customer Data Belongs in the Cloud and Why You Need to Control Jurisdiction By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, March 6, 2014